“[We] never really looked at it as a sequel so much as another story featuring this character,” said Monsieur Spade series co-creator, writer, and executive producer Scott Frank during a TCA press conference. The six-part series concludes tonight at 9/8c on AMC, and will also be available to stream at that same time on both AMC+ and Acorn TV. Dashiell Hammett’s detective character is best known today through the 1941 film adaptation of The Maltese Falcon. “We were just taking an icon and dissecting what happens when that icon gets older. The reality of the myth of the tough guy who's smoking and hanging out with inappropriate women and so on. We thought, what if that guy gets older? It would be fun to see the results of that life, and then tell a story starting from there. So it was more a part two of the character than anything else.”
(Jean-Claude Lother/AMC)
Screen legend Humphrey Bogart portrayed Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, a portrayal that proved valuable to the actor walking in his shoes this time around, Clive Owen. “I'm a huge fan of his,” the British actor shared about leaning into Bogart’s portrayal to help craft his voice in the series, particularly since Spade finds himself a fish out of water in France. “I needed to center myself in the origins of the part. And that seemed vocally the most sensible thing to do, is to lean into that. So I actually lifted all of Bogart's dialogue, just his dialogue, nobody else's, from The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, put them on a Voice Note, and that was my go-to at the beginning of every day, just to remind myself of the origins of the guy that I was playing.
Humphrey Bogart was famous for his quick delivery in the neo noir mystery, and with Clive Owen echoing that in his performance, the rest of the cast had to keep up. “I was very lucky that I got to spend a lot of time with the scripts beforehand,” revealed Cara Bossom, who plays Teresa, a juvenile who finds herself in the care of the retired gumshoe. “Really ingraining yourself in those words so that then they come and they flow so naturally and that you have that rhythm. And then, I have the added bonus of having to work with the accent as Clive did… It was a multi-layered approach to it that knowing and trusting what you're saying hits the character so well and that you're not second-guessing what you're saying, that was sort of the greatest help.”
“We never worried about pleasing anybody except being true to the characters,” explained writer and executive producer Tom Fontana about not allowing the show to be too beholden to the source material. “I have always loved Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man, Sam Spade. But, I will admit that Scott is the expert in things Hammett. So, it was actually a great collaboration because we both brought our individual insanity to the show. Scott really knows all of that stuff, and he was great at making sure that I didn't color outside the lines unless we needed to color outside the lines.”
The six-part series concludes tonight in which all of the season’s mysteries will presumably be resolved. “The cast that Scott and Tom put together were just so hugely impressive,” concluded Clive Owen. “Spade has a different relationship with every character in that. And every single person that I would do scenes with, it was a thrill to bounce this great dialogue with, and play. There were many times during the shoot of this show where I literally said to myself as an actor, ‘This is exactly where I want to be. I love the genre. I have great dialogue to speak, and I did it with great actors.’”
Catch up on past episodes of Monsieur Spade streaming on AMC+ and Acorn TV.